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WHEN Lucy Green stepped on to the stage at Wellington’s St James Theatre on July 21 it was in front of the toughest crowd imaginable. Dancers from every era of Royal New Zealand Ballet’s history were in town for the company’s 60th anniversary celebrations and they’d come en masse to a special matinee performance of Swan Lake. They would see a 22-year-old Australian who had made her debut in the double role of Odette-Odile only two days before. Many pairs of expert eyes would be assessing her every move.

Lucy Green as Odette. Photo: Evan Li

That’s not all. There were also television cameras in the wings, filming for the third series of the reality show about RNZB, The Secret Lives of Dancers, and those cameras weren’t around just to capture what used to be called Kodak moments. Green has been prominent in the first two series and knows only too well that drama and conflict are considered more entertaining, and that filming is stressful. It’s also relevant that last week Green was alternating with RNZB’s stellar principal guest artist Gillian Murphy, she of American Ballet Theatre fame and one of Swan Lake’s great exponents.

These are circumstances to test any performer’s mettle but brutal as they may be, they sort out the women from the girls; the winners from the losers. By ballet’s end Green had won through. She had shown what RNZB’s artistic director, former American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Ethan Stiefel, calls her ability to “continually rise to the occasion”.

Clutching flowers, she beamed as cheers rang around the theatre and Stiefel said from the stage: “I couldn’t have picked a better group of people to put before six decades of alumni. I’m proud to work with all of you.”

Green is a quietly poised, thoughtful and modest young woman, aware of her good fortune and grateful for it. “I never, ever thought that I would ever get the opportunity and especially not at this age. It’s a role I never dared to think I would do,” she says. She has form, however. Also on her CV after just three years with RNZB is Giselle, which she danced on the company’s recent tour to China, and last year’s Cinderella.

She is talented, a rising star, no doubt about it. But the thing everyone mentions about Green – the unromantic but necessary part of the equation – is that she has worked indefatigably for her success. This is the less thrilling but more truthful secret life of the dancer.

The story started at Australia Street Infants School, in Sydney’s Newtown. “It was quite a radical school at the time,” says Green’s mother, Bridget. “The parents got together and decided contact sport was a no-no. They employed a dance teacher.” Lucy was entranced from the start. “She was with Miss Jenny, who she adored and who imbued a passion for dance. Lucy asked me if she could go to after-school classes in the school hall. She never looked back. She decided that was it. She was a dancer.”

Jenny Eldridge (“Miss Jenny”) says Lucy “focused, listened and concentrated from the word go. She was a beautiful child to teach.” Many years later Eldridge saw Green compete at the City of Sydney Eisteddford, in a solo from Giselle, and “the thing that captured me about her was that she was dancing from her heart”.

After the Green family moved to Melbourne Lucy studied at the National Theatre Ballet School under Beverly Jane Fry’s directorship. There she came to understand what aiming for a life in ballet demands: not just liking it or wanting it, but the effort it takes. After that epiphany she took every class possible, says her mother. “That’s the key to Lucy. She’s serious and she works hard.” Green successfully auditioned for the Australian Ballet School but chose the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School. “She saw Maggie Lorraine as a mentor and she knew that she’d made the right decision,” says her mother. Lorraine was Green’s teacher at VCASS for four years and also mentions the hard graft: Green “didn’t have an easy body to work with. She virtually resculpted her body.”

At one point Green would have liked to join the Australian Ballet. The offer, however, came from across the Tasman. “From day one when she auditioned, straight away … we had to have her. She shone,” says Greg Horsman, formerly ballet master with RNZB and now with Queensland Ballet. “She’s very musical, she’s very co-ordinated and she has amazing turns. And she’s intelligent. You can give her a correction and she takes it on board right away. I loved working with her.”

Green found out she was being considered for Odette only eight weeks before her Swan Lake debut, having just returned from a three-week European holiday with her boyfriend, Rory Fairweather-Neylan, also a dancer with RNZB. It wasn’t the best preparation, she acknowledges, having not been able to take regular classes, but at least there was an eight-week rehearsal period ahead. The production being revived was that created by former RNZB artistic Russell Kerr, with designs by Kristian Fredrikson.

Lucy Green as Odile with Kohei Iwamoto. Photo: Evan Li

As is the way with dance companies, the news was relayed via a list on the company noticeboard that had names, in alphabetical order, alongside various roles. Green was down to learn Odette-Odile as were three other company members. “We had no warning. It just went up one day, this is what you’re learning.” The fifth name on the list was Murphy’s. Engaged to Stiefel, Murphy spends a significant amount of time at RNZB. She is also one of Green’s great inspirations.

“She is the perfect embodiment of the white and the black,” Green says. “She really makes you believe she is a swan in the white acts … the delicacy of her arms and her hands. It’s like they are actually wings. Everything she does comes from the heart. As Odile she’s completely the opposite. The eyes are so powerful, she commands everyone to look at her and she owns the stage. I’ve loved watching her and studying her. But you have to be careful – you don’t want to be a cheap copy of something someone’s already been.”

Obviously Murphy would be getting performances. As for the rest of them, “you could be an understudy or you could be doing it. You don’t know.”

Throughout the rehearsal period Green was getting a lot of coaching – unusually not from a former Odette but from Stiefel and ballet master Martin Vedel. “But we didn’t learn who was doing what when” until about two and a half weeks before opening. “There was always the hope, I guess. It’s a small company [34 dancers], so it was more likely than being in a big company of course. I had had a lot of encouragement about the roles I’d done previously so I was quite hopeful, but you never want to get your hopes up too much.

“People know any roles can be up for grabs by anyone. There’s a lot of disappointment sometimes when someone doesn’t get something they want, but I do find here people are so supportive that they tend to put aside their disappointments. That’s something that I really felt [at the first performance], the energy I got from everyone, even those who might want to be doing the role I’m doing.”

Being far from the major ballet centres meant Green had to go to YouTube to see how others approach the role. “I remember watching these long, beautiful dancers with long classical lines, their legs go on forever, their arms are just like wings. I never thought I’d have those qualities. But yeah, here I am, and I’ve done it. I can’t believe it.” And while she was able to have only one orchestral rehearsal, she found Tchaikovsky’s music inspiring. “It’s got all the emotion and all the qualities you need,” she says.

Then there’s all that work. “You’ve got to put in a lot yourself. You’ve got to make the corrections sit with your body and feel right. One of the main concerns with me dancing the role was everything was quite small to begin with. I didn’t have the expansiveness, the full breadth of movement. I could feel it, but when you see yourself [some rehearsals were filmed] you can see what [coaches are] talking about and better apply what they are saying.’’

Another help was dancing with Japanese-born, Australian Ballet School-trained Kohei Iwamoto, 23, as Siegfried. (“He’s another nice dancer with huge potential,” says Horsman.) Iwamoto has partnered Green before, notably in Giselle, and it’s “a really good partnership. When I go out there and I see him I feel really comfortable and I trust him. It’s really nice.’’

In a company of this size it’s not all Odette and Giselle, however: Green dances secondary roles too and gets few performances off. She dreams in the future of Juliet and Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon and of perhaps dancing in Europe, but in the immediate future, after Swan Lake, lies the biennial Tutus on Tour program that splits the company and takes ballet to small NZ centres where “you have one dressing room for 16 dancers, and you’re sharing a bathroom with the audience”.

It’s a blast, she says. “It’s kind of crazy but you get this close group of dancers and everyone supports each other. It’s an intense workload but somehow we manage to pull it off.”

Swan Lake continues at various NZ centres until September 1.

This is a slightly extended version of a profile that first appeared in The Australian on July 25.